No German news on TV today! Whose fault is that?
It comes from SBS, with a charter for
multiculturalism, broadcasts news programmes in many languages, as long as there's nothing
more important, like football at the other end of the (English-speaking) world. So I've
come to accept that I don't get any news on Sundays.

But today was Saturday, and they should have broadcast at least the first half of the „Der
Tag“ programme (they don't seem to have noticed that the programme was recently extended
from 30 to 60 minutes). So I checked; they did. But my MythTV box with the stupid
name greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H didn't record it.

That's not
the first time. I can't predict when it will happen, and I can't find a clean way to
restart MythTV without rebooting the machine. And that doesn't work cleanly because
I have two bootable partitions, and it seems almost impossible to configure GRUB, one of the most appalling pieces of
software I have ever seen: I have to reboot manually. And that again is not easy because I
removed the monitor a couple of days ago.

All this for half the German news over terrestrial TV? Nothing else on TV seems to be worth
watching, not helped by the difficulties configuring Mythweb. Even when I find
something worthwhile, I still have the issue with interference from the electric fence
actuator.

Is it worth it? No! Powered down the box. DW does broadcast the programme online (in full
length, of course), but I can't find a way to download it, so I'm limited to certain times
of day to watch it. But that may be worthwhile. So I powered down the box. Next step is
to rebuild it as tiwi to watch videos: the current tiwi is another, less
powerful box, and sometimes the difference shows.

Went out looking for the cultivar for my
new Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
bush, which according to the label is “Flamenco™ HibiQs Hibiscus sinensis Arion Arionicus”.
As guessed, that means that the cultivar is Arionicus. And it's patented!

A new and distinct cultivar of Hibiscus plant named ‘Arionicus’, characterized by its
upright to somewhat outwardly spreading plant form; dense and bushy plant habit; glossy
dark green-colored leaves; freely, uniform and continuous flowering habit; large
red-colored flowers with dark red purple-colored centers; good flower longevity; and good
garden performance.

Reading the document gave a surprising amount of detail about the plant, including the
information that it tolerates temperatures down to 1°, presumably a careful way of saying
that it won't tolerate freezing, and something that the plant label didn't think worth
mentioning. And then:

Plant height.—About 35 cm to 55 cm.

Plant diameter (area of spread).—About 30 cm to 50 cm.

That's tiny! In fact, the plant I have is already 40 cm high. Was that on the plant label?
No, it says 1.5 m. Why the discrepancy?

I've already established that the URL on
the QR code has nothing to do with the
plant, but a search brought me up this page with more details.

Why are these things always so inaccurate? It also says that the height is 1 m. Can I
believe it? It offers the download of a label, which proves identical to the one that came
with my plant—the one that makes no mention of cold tolerance and claims a height of 1.5 m:

ALDI had a generator on special today. Why
should I be interested? It has inverter technology and a pure sine wave output, something
that maybe my fussy Eaton UPS will accept. But I
forgot about it until 11:00, after which into town to look for one. All sold out almost
immediately. Back home, nothing achieved apart from a waste of petrol and time.

After a lot of consideration, I've ordered a
second-hand ThinkPad T430,
which cost me $295. Time to sell my iPhone. Took a few photos and off to eBay to sell it. In the past I've had much pain fighting their postage specifications, which
invariably put in the incorrect sums, requiring me to go to the equally emetic Australia Post website, so this time decided that it
was just plain simpler to offer free postage within Australia.

On the positive side, they now have estimates of what the item should bring, at least in the
case of the iPhone: $285. That's nearly what the laptop cost. Decided on an initial asking
price of $210, “Buy it Now” at $285. Finalized the listing, and then went back to check.
It had forgotten the “Buy it Now”. OK, I'm used to this pain. Back to update it. Clicked
on “Update Listing”. Wait... ECONNRESET!

OK, that's frequently a retryable issue. Tried again. “Please sign in”, “Oops, wrong
password”. Dammit, I have the password stored! It's the same one I've been using for
months. Several attempts, which resulted in them dragging
out CAPTCHAs to annoy me. In the end I
gave up and tried to reset the password:

No spaces? Yes, my old password had spaces. But why did they choose right now to annoy me
with it? Thought out an appropriately insulting password without spaces, and finally I was
able to log in again. Updated the listing. Still no “Buy it Now” price. Did
I maybe forget to put the price in, and the programmer forgot to add code to complain?
Third time lucky. Total time, just for the corrections, about 20 minutes.

It wasn't until later that I saw that I had received mail from eBay:

We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your
permission. We’ve reset your eBay password.

What reason? ECONNRESET? I can't imagine there was a real cause. I also can't
make up my mind whether it was correct not to tell me online. But the general impression is
that eBay is still at least as much a pain as ever.

Ah, I don't know what “swipe” means. Well, somebody doesn't. I've already commented on the OEDs descriptions. But of course all this stuff comes from
US English. What's their dictionary? Webster. According to Google, “No
other dictionary matches M-W's accuracy and scholarship in defining word meanings. Our
pronunciation help, synonyms, usage and grammar tips set the ...”, though their site doesn't
make this claim, possibly hidden by broken rendering.

The entry for the verb swipe is certainly much more succinct than the OED definition:

1 : to strike or wipe with a sweeping motion

2 : steal, pilfer

3 : to slide (a card with a magnetic strip or bar code) through a slot in a reading device
so that information stored on the strip can be processed (as in making a purchase)

The difference from OED is important: it requires a sweeping motion. And while the
corresponding noun is defined as “a strong sweeping blow”, the verb seems to have weakened.

So in general I suppress my aversion and swipe surfaces on touch screens without dealing a
violent blow. But trying again doesn't help. And then Jamie Fraser asked me in which
direction I was “swiping”. Huh? Does that make a difference? Yes, indeed. Swipe to the
left and it really switches to the camera. Swipe to the right and it takes you back to
where you were before you turned the power off.

Once you know it, it more or less makes sense. But how am I expected to know that? These
things are too intuitive to have
a manual. Yet another violation
of POLA.

It's coming on 8 years since I propagated it from a cutting from the bush in front of my
uncle Max's house
in Camberwell. Time to
repot it, for which we have a larger pot. Here it is after that, along with a vertical
reorientation of nearly 45°, along with the new Hibiscus “Arionicus”, also in a larger pot,
to the right.

One of the things that I had noted early on about the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II is
that it isn't faster than the Mark I in every respect. The flash sync is only 1/250 s
instead of 1/320 s on the old model. Is this a real difference, or just adjusted specs? By
chance I had the wrong settings when taking my photos of
the Hibiscus indoors: I
had the camera set on P instead of M. By chance the exposure was correct
(really to within ⅓ EV), but the first image I took was at 1/320 s. And yes, there's
cut-off at the top:

A number of system installations are looming: now that I have given up on MythTV, the machine is going begging, and the
obvious thing to do is to use it to replace tiwi, since it has more much-needed CPU
power. But the system on tiwi is over a year old, and there are some ports
conflicts. So I should first install a newer version on the new machine.

And then there's my new laptop, which claims to have been sent last Friday but in fact was
sent yesterday evening, and about which Fastway knows no more. It has a 160 GB SSD with Microsoft “Windows” 7 “Professional”. How do I install FreeBSD on it? After some consideration, it seems that a
virtual machine is best. That way I maintain the original disk structure for Microsoft, and
in addition I have the advantage that I can run both “machines” at once, something that
suits my photo processing setup very well.

I've been fighting system upgrades for nearly 20 years now, and it's not getting any easier.
After some thought, I decided on maintaining a virtual machine with a software installation
matching, as closely as practical, the environment of eureka, so clearly it should be
called eureso (εὕρησω), which is also in keeping with other machines with names
starting in e and ending with a vowel: the laptop will be
called euroa (Microsoft)
and euboea (FreeBSD).

So installed a VM and, once again, fought to install ports. By chance I'm reviewing an
upcoming book on FreeBSD by Michael W. Lucas, and the specific chapter is about packages.
How about that, it contains a whole lot of helpful information that I didn't know about. In
particular, the Ports Collectiondoes distinguish between explicitly (“non-automatic”) installed ports and
dependencies (“automatic ports”). It doesn't, however, maintain the sequence, which can be
important when installing ports with common dependencies. For example, it makes sense to
install X (Xorg) before Emacs (emacs25), but the list of
ports comes out the other way round, in alphabetical order. So I've also written a wrapper
function that installs a package and keeps a record of the package name and the date
installed. That kept things going most of the day, of course.

Lately I've been reading “How far to Bethlehem”,
by Norah Lofts, a book that I have
had for nearly 50 years and never read: it seems to have belonged to Sue Fortescue. It describes
the Nativity from the viewpoint
of the people described in the biblical representations, even though the personifications of
the Magi are somewhat unlikely.
It's nicely written, but sticks too closely to the original story as perceived by an English
public of 50 years ago. Does anybody still really believe that Mary and Joseph had to
travel by foot from Nazareth
to Bethlehem in the middle of winter
for a census to be held in Mary's home town? It's almost as improbable
as Virgin Birth. Still, an
interesting read.

Mr. Csongvay went through a lot of detail, explaining that it seems that a bit of bone was
broken off the joint during the accident. What can we do about it? Not much. A bit of
therapy, maybe. The only reason to operate would be if it got worse, either from the point
of view of flexion or of pain. And then the operation would just fuse the joint to keep it
in the position it is now.

The radio alarm that I bought last
August works, but it's irritating: the display is really bright, so I have to cover it
to get any sleep. The interface is terrible, the clock inaccurate, and the sound quality
terrible. I can do better, so today looked in at The Good Guys to see what they had. The most
expensive was a Panasonic RC-700 that looked like it had escaped from the 1990s:

Look at that tuning scale! Analogue! And the horizontal line on the right is the tuning
wheel. I don't know when I last saw something like that. But the salesgirl told me that it
had the best sound, and looking at the loudspeakers, that seemed reasonable. So I bought
it.

Back home I discovered the truth: the thing can't count the hours. It only does a 12 hour
clock, something that I dislike at the best of times, and not what I want near me while I'm
sleeping. And there's nothing in the specs to say so—in fact, the specs barely mention the clock at all (“Quartz Clock:
Yes”), also terminology that suggests that the item has been around for ever. It goes back.

On the way into town, dropped in at Joan Parrington's and picked up the dog bath that I had
looked at last September.
It still doesn't work, and I still don't want to repair it myself. But what's the
Ballarat Pump Shop for? After my stuff in town, took it in and left it there for a
quote; in fact, they gave me one as soon as I saw it, and they stuck to it: $50, certainly
worth the price. They called back home shortly after I arrived to tell me I could pick it
up again. I have the feeling that it might have been easier just to wait for it.

I'm interested in your item, so I will offer you AU $320.00, including shipping cost,
make payment via paypal and then send it to Malaysia within 4 to 6 days. Thanks and best
regards.

What sounds fishy about that? I don't know, but something does. Maybe: why does he want
this particular iPhone when he can get it cheaper
in Malaysia? But the price offered was
$35 more than my “Buy it Now” price, and it would cost me about $28 to send it, so the
answer is a clear:

Should I include it in the listing? Why not? Others might have the same idea. So I did.

That was at 17:19. Went back to check an hour later. Sold! At 18:14. But not to this
buyer, somebody in Australia, in fact
not that far from
Ballarat. Coincidence? I think
probably not. The ultimate buyer was watching the item and saw it going away before she got
a chance to bid.

The funds you receive from eBay sales may not be available for up to 21 days at https://www.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/sell/ShipToFund-outside. This could be because you are still yet to meet eBay's selling and PayPal's risk standards. If the buyer reports an issue, the funds may be held for longer.

- Mark your items at http://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayBeta&View=SoldNext&SubmitAction.ChangeFilter=x&NewFilter=WaitShipment&CurrentPage=MyeBayNextSold as shipped on eBay.

21 days? I “are [sic] still yet to meet eBay's selling and PayPal's risk standards”?
I should send via USPS? What is this
crap? I've been with PayPal since 13 December 2001, and I've never had
any problems. These people continue to annoy me.

It really annoyed me that PayPal wants to keep
my money for 21 days. The reasons didn't make sense: “This could be that you
are [sic] still yet to meet eBay's selling and PayPal's risk standards”. What
does could mean? If they don't know for sure, they shouldn't withhold funds. And
“yet”? I've been an eBay customer since 3
July 1999 and a PayPal customer since 13 December 2001. And I've sold
things before without this nonsense.

Fought my way through the PayPal web site to https://www.paypal.com/au/selfhelp/contact/call to get a contact code, and spoke
to Eson (if I got the spelling right), another non-native English speaker who appears to
have learnt American English from an audio course with 1940s quality audio, and thus grated
to a point that I could barely understand her. But what she told me is interesting: it
could be (blah, blah, blah...) seller rating below average (no, it isn't, it's above
average, so why didn't she check?), that I had had several disputes (no, no, never), or that
I'm a casual seller.

And that's it. I have sold less than 25 items in the last 90 days, or the sum was less than
$2,500. And under those circumstances eBay (and not PayPal) categorizes me as a casual
seller and imposes these restrictions.

OK, that makes sense, but it asks more questions than it answers. Why doesn't PayPal say
so? Because, she says, this is a decision made by eBay. That's nonsense, of course. If
she can tell me that, they can put it on their web site. And they can put it in the mail
that they sent.

She recommended to me to send the item as quickly as possible, and the funds may become
available more quickly.

While messing around on the PayPal web site,
found a reply to the message I sent six weeks ago, pointing out that they hadn't deducted any money from my account. Did
they call me? Of course not. Did they send email? No. Instead what I got was a message
accessible only from their web site:

Thanks for contacting us. Based on your selection, the following FAQs may assist you faster than we can:

A. Why did my bank return the random deposits?
B. How do I view my transaction history?
C. How do I withdraw money from my PayPal account?
D. How does PayPal determine which funds will be used for a purchase?
E. How do I ask for a refund?
F. How do I resolve a negative balance?
G. How do I report an unautorised transaction?

(Don't worry. These links won't redirect you to another webpage.)

If these do not answer your question, please reply to this email with as much information as
possible.

To come up with that, they must have completely ignored the content of my message. None is
in the slightest relevant. I thought that level of stupidity was over and done with.

How do I send the iPhone?
eBay have a number of shipping options, as
usual not very well documented. It seems that the obvious one is the pre-paid satchel.
Does that really cover all costs? There's nothing that gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling.
But it does say that the costs are covered, so I selected “500 g satchel”. OK, $7.35, about
the same price as an Australia Post satchel, and it did say that the postage cost was covered. So I printed one out, and
got a message confirming the fact.

Looked at the item status. Shipped! Nonsense! How can they think that printing the label
equates to shipping? It's as good as impossible. But it explains the discrepancy that I
noted on Tuesday: my laptop
was sent on Monday evening, but according to eBay it was sent on Friday evening. I was
going to blame the seller, but it seems that eBay itself is to blame.

The other thing of interest was that the funds availability date had changed, from “21 days”
to 19 April. Why? No explanation.

Three days and no update? Time to call them up. Submit online enquiry? I suppose I could
try that, but it wanted me to fill out no less than 25 fields, including stuff like mobile
phone numbers and address of sender. Far too much trouble. So let's call them up. There's
a “Courier locator” on their web site:

No list, of course, and if there had been, it would have had only one entry. Another broken
web site! But they have some depot phone numbers, so found
the Ballarat one, phone “+61 (0) 3 5222
5050”, called them and spoke to Steve, who told me that he couldn't help me, and mentioned
something about Geelong that didn't quite
make sense. He suggested that I call up
in Wollongong.

Geelong? Geelong? There was something there. Yes, there it was: three years ago I had an absolutely
impossible time getting components sent to me. It finally took 8 days after raising a lot
of hell.

But that wasn't the only time: only a few weeks later I received a parcel
that they managed to take 10 days delivering. No good omen.

Called up Wollongong and spoke to Tishina, who proves to spell her name Tesheena. She told
me that it had been sent to an “onforwarder”, Australia Post, and the due to the length of the tracking number she would send it by
email.

Broken tracking, broken web site, broken delivery system. Of course they should have
broken DNS too. What do I do?
I'm not going to break my mail configuration just for them. But on
reading /usr/local/etc/postfix/mail.cf more carefully, it occurred to me that I can
make an exception to the “client host name must resolve” rule in client-access, so
did that, and on the next retry received the tracking number, 99700160WJY132932001022103352.
OK, what does Australia Post have to say?

When was this package sent? Called up Wollongong and spoke to Tesheena again, who told me
that it had been forwarded to Australia Post on Monday, but couldn't give me a time. She
blames Australia Post, but until proof of the contrary (at least some tracking information),
that sounds improbable.

I suspect that one thing that helped me sell my iPhone was the buyer
in Ipoh, who didn't seem quite kosher.
Today he confirmed my opinion. At 11:40 I got the message:

I will need your paypal email to make the payment.

Wrong! Firstly, it's not correct procedure. And secondly the item was sold 17 hours
previously. Time to report to eBay.

But how? Their web people haven't thought of that. In the end I had yet another phone
call, where they were certainly interested, and did something about it. But that sort of
thing happens all the time. Why no online reporting method?

The reason is clear: online shopping. Three years ago I wrote an essay on the subject, in which I wrote:

Most purchases will occur on-line, and the few remaining shops will mainly exist to order
and supply goods available on the Internet. The exceptions will be fresh goods such as
food and some services where a view of the items in advance is desired, such as some
clothes. This will also have a profound effect on the economy: many companies, notably
shops and mall owners, will go bankrupt. The future will favour those who can adapt.

Three years on, this seems to be exactly the case.

Why isn't it happening faster? eBay has been
around for nearly 20 years now, and today's articles show how much they still have to do.
Sometimes I wonder if they can get anything right.

Another power failure this
morning at 8:18. Out to start the generator—tank empty, of course—and spent several minutes
doing that. Fortunately it started immediately, once I remembered to turn the ignition
switch on, and nothing was lost in the office. But of course I had to turn
off lagoon. But then, that was only 30 days uptime. And somehow I had to wash the
petrol off my fingers without any water. We should keep a few litres on the side for such
eventualities.

With Nikolai, Sasha and Yvonne to
the Eureka Village Hostel and the Geoffrey
Cutter Centre. People are fading: Bill, who normally comes with me, hasn't been out
of his room in days, and was asleep when I looked in. Bob Carr, who two weeks ago was on
oxygen, is looking pretty terrible, and I called in the nurse to check on him. And a couple
of others have moved to “House 1”, the one for dementia. John, one of the people who was
always pleased to see Niko, now appears afraid of him. Sigh. I suppose one day
we'll end up like that.

The funds from this eBay payment are now available. Check your Transaction Details (
https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/transaction/details/mumble ) for more information.

And yes, the spaces round the parentheses are original, presumably to indicate that this
message really came from PayPal.

So: we have three different statements from PayPal. Initially it should have taken 21
days. Then, because I printed a shipping label, this dropped to 14 days. And after another
10 hours, with no other activity whatsoever, the funds suddenly became available. Why?
Withholding payments causes concern. They should only do it when there are real concerns,
and they should document the situation much better than they do.

To the post office to post the iPhone. No, Australia post does not provide a satchel. The label states “500g
satchel”, but I have to provide it myself: further proof that the eBay documentation is inadequate. Fortunately I had put
the items in a small box to take them to the post office, so I was able to stick the label
on that and send it with no further problems. But yet
another POLA
violation.

After resetting my iPhone prior to shipment, received a typically stupid email:

Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2017 03:16:39 +0000 (GMT)

From: Find My iPhone <noreply@email.apple.com>

To: groggyhimself@lemis.com

Subject: Find My iPhone has been disabled on Greg 's iPhone

Find My iPhone has been disabled on Greg 's iPhone

With Find My iPhone disabled, this device can no longer be located, placed in lost
mode, or remotely erased using icloud.com/find or the Find My iPhone iOS app.

In addition, your Apple ID and password will no longer be required for someone to
erase, reactivate, and use your iPhone.

“Greg 's iPhone” (note the space)? What's that? In my case, of course, it's clear.
But I'm sure many people have more than one iPhone. Once again they leave out
information necessary to identify the device in the general case. Why can't they include
the IMEI number, for example?

What puzzles me is that the carnage in Syria has been going on for years, and hundreds of
thousands of people have been killed. Why now? His current action was directed against an
airfield from which they believe that the recent chemical weapon attack was launched.

Was this correct? Maybe, even. Was it justified? Maybe, even. My first reaction (in
German) was „Ach du dicke Scheiße“ (“oh shit”, literally “oh you thick shit”). It took a
while to realize that “you thick shit” would be a good British expression to Trump himself
(“stupid idiot”). Still, this attack seems to be too finely planned to be Trump's doing:

It was limited and “appropriate”. I would have expected Trump to react much more
violently. Only 6 people were killed, by comparison a drop in the ocean.

It will show the Syrians and
the Russians that time has come for
fundamental change. Maybe it will help unblock the stalemate in
the Security
Council.

It will show the Chinese that the USA
can get past Russian anti-missile defences, and that if necessary they can take out
targets in North Korea. The
opinions that I have heard are that the timing was bad because of the visit
of Xi Jinping. I'm more inclined
to believe that this was deliberate.

But why now? Because less than 100 people were killed by chemical weapons? Is death
by Sarin more agonizing than death by
having your innards blown out? Is the death of a child so much worse than the death of an
adult? They're all hideous. I think the real reason is because the US news media have made
such a fuss about it. For once, it seems, Trump has acknowledged that it isn't
“fake news”.

Checking the tracking for my laptop, I find the interesting information from Australia Post:

Current Status: In transit

Processed through Australia Post facility

8:30pm Fri 7 Apr

Sunshine West, VIC

And that's the only tracking entry! Somehow on Monday it disappeared from Fastway's tracking system and materialized four days
later in Australia Post's system and 800 km away without any indication how, where or when.
At least Tesheena from Fastway (whom Chris Bahlo has christened “Lastway”) was right when
she told me that a couple of days ago. Of course, Chris isn't not the first. And my
negative opinion seems to be
typical.

My new Olympus OM-D
E-M1 Mark II can take up to 60 photos a second, and frequently enough I take more than
one a second—today I must have taken about half the images with less than a second between
them. But that doesn't work for flash. This evening's flash photos worked about 2 times
out of 3. The others were underexposed because the flash hadn't recharged.

It's not as if the flash is slow on recharge. They're mains powered flashes with a recycle
time of a little under 2 seconds, but that's clearly too slow, as this comparison of one of
the images above shows. Run the cursor over either image to compare
with the partner, and click to see a larger version:

The weather today was abominable—high winds and rain (46 mm of it). The ground water pump
somehow seized up, so once again we had water over the entrance to the house. But while I
was wondering about that, the power
failed, at 16:43.

The power outages page didn't want to know. Just a couple of people
in Rokewood Junction, which is
on the same feeder that goes
through Dereel. Called up Powercor and was transferred pretty quickly—to
a South Australian menu system,
which knew my location, somewhere I had never heard of. OK, press 2 for “no, not the
correct address”, and the thing wanted my meter number! Only then did I realize that I had
been misconnected to the wrong state—how could that happen?—and hung up.

Almost immediately I got a call back from the first person I spoke to, apologizing that she
couldn't connect me. That's the first time that has happened to me. She told me that in
the meantime something like 4,000 customers were affected, so there wasn't much to do.
Estimated restoration time 19:00.

We had invited Chris Bahlo over for dinner, not a thing that we could do under the
circumstances, so packed up our stuff and over to her place: she has solar electricity, and
was thus unaffected. While we were there, watched the red areas on the Powercor map grow
and grow, and the restoration time get later and later. By the time we went home, it was
1:00.

Back home, the generator was still running, so filled it up from the petrol I had drained
last month. And it started
normally for a hot generator (which means at least 5 pulls on the start cord; when it's cold
it's only one or maybe two) and carried on with no further problems. So the suggestion that
the problem is water in the carburettor begins to make more sense.

Surprisingly, the power came back at almost exactly the predicted time, at 1:03. The
generator was still running, and eureka weathered the entire 8+ hour outage.

When we built the house, I decided not to install solar panels right away: to do so would
require lots of expensive batteries, and it made sense to wait. But what price peace of
mind? Time to finally get something installed

Chris Bahlo gave me a Microsoft-formatted disk to copy some data for her, so plugged it
into dischord and copied the data. OK, how do I umount it? Must be some
right-button menu. But I couldn't find it. As expected, “umount” is spelt “eject” in
Microsoft, but of course there's no program called EJECT. Off to Google, which showed that this is a problem, but that there should, indeed, be
an eject item in the right mouse menu. Why wasn't it there? I didn't have time to
look. We had lost power, and it seemed like a good idea to shut down the machine anyway, so
that's what I did. And then I forgot to take the disk with me when we went to Chris' place.

I have more or less decided on the system names euroa (Microsoft) and euboea
(FreeBSD) for my new laptop, but it would be
nice to find an Australian place name matching eu.*a instead of euboea.
Discussing the matter after dinner, we didn't come to much in the way of results (I've
already had eucla), but I did mention the existence of /usr/share/dict/web2 on
FreeBSD. Checked on Chris' Apple. Yes, it's there too, and a partial output showed:

$ grep ^eu.*a$ /usr/share/dict/web2euphoria
euthanasia

Now wouldn't that be a good choice for FreeBSD and Microsoft respectively?

Into town to pick up the laptop and the dog bath that I left at the Ballarat Pump
Shoplast week. It
made sense to pick up the bath first, but of course I wanted the laptop. A good thing too:
I had forgotten my handbag again, and while the people at the post office know me and
gave me the item without identification, but if I had gone on
to Ballarat, another 43 km round trip,
it would have been a waste of time.

The laptop looks nicer than I expected. The item description included “The screen has a few
VERY minor blemishes”, but I couldn't find any. They did, however, lay the invoice on the
keyboard, so that sounds like something to repeat when transporting it. The keyboard is
also one of the nicest I have seen on a laptop. But I had happily forgotten the pain of
using trackpads, and this one is no better than the others. Fortunately I have a mouse.

First thing: make backup media. The program gave me a list of backup devices: none.
Something wrong with the DVD writer? No, it found it after I pressed the eject button. It
seems it was powered down, something that the backup software obviously didn't expect. It
also didn't expect to recover from accidentally having a non-erasable data disk in the
drive, which caused it to stop again. And when it did find the drive and valid media, it
complained because I pressed “Next” before the drive was up to speed!

How should I know when it's up to speed? Easy: another program (“Autoplay”) creates a popup
asking what to do with it. What a mess!

Finally worked around the bugs and made my backup. That took forever. A
total of 5 DVDs (boot medium and data backup), at 20 minutes odd per disk, including over 5
minutes hanging on “Verification complete: 100%”. The first time round I had finger trouble
after the boot disk, and the program stopped. When I restarted it, it had tick boxes for
“boot media” and “data media”, but when I unticked “boot media” I also lost “data media”.
So I now have two boot disks, in case one fails. And there was nothing to tell me how many
DVDs I would need.

After that, though, things went surprisingly smoothly, maybe because I'm gradually getting
my act together with my setup page.
About the only issues I had were:

Network setup was strange. This box has not two, but three network interfaces:
wired, 802.11
and Bluetooth. Setting up the
wired interface was straightforward enough, but the wireless network didn't want to
know. After a bit of fiddling around, managed to get the interface to work, but this is
clearly something I need to learn about. Mañana.

Installing VirtualBox went smoothly
enough, except that it wanted to disconnect the network as part of the installation.
But that was relatively short.

So I tried creating a virtual machine. It only offered me 32 bit variants! Why that?
Surely this is a 64 bit “Windows” box? Look at
it tomorrow.

Yesterday's installation of euroa went surprisingly smoothly, but of course it's not
done yet. In particular I have two items that I have never done before: a FreeBSD guest on a VirtualBox host on Microsoft “Windows”, and a way of keeping the same IP address for the Microsoft
machine when moving between
wired Ethernet and
wireless 802.11.

First VBox. Why does it only offer 32 bit clients? Off to Google and found this page, which looked very relevant:
a ThinkPad with recently
installed SSD, just like euroa. Went
through that and discovered that he was running Microsoft “Windows” 8.1, and that the corresponding settings don't exist on my “Windows”
7 Professional. But after finally managing to enter the BIOS (in the end, I think
it's F2), I discovered that virtualization had been disabled. Enabled that, and all
was well.

Next, copy the virtual disk for eureso and enable it. Where does VBox store its
files on Microsoft? It proves to be C:\Users\grog\VirtualBox VMs, which
contains the files for the VMs, but not the configuration. Tried to fake it anyway by
replacing the virtual disk, but after a few attempts that failed with UUID mismatches. But
I was able to create a new machine with the disk from eureso, and that worked. Even
the networking ran once I set the bridged adapter and guessed the correct interface. About
the only thing that didn't work was to ping the device, though routing appeared to work.

Next was X. No go. I got the following rather
conflicting messages from xinit:

euroa has three network
interfaces: Ethernet, good for normal
desktop use, 802.11 wireless, good for
most of the rest of the time,
and Bluetooth, which so far appears to
be of no use at all. Is it maybe useful for tethering to a mobile phone? That would
be useful, since the machine doesn't have any mobile phone connectivity.

Normally the machine is on my desk in the office, but I want to be able to wander round the
house and use it elsewhere. And that should be transparent: except for the network link (to
the same network), everything should remain the same.

How do I do that? I never got round to doing it on my FreeBSD. Is it even possible? Both interfaces must have the same IP address,
something that's usually a no-no. And sure enough, Microsoft protects me from myself by
issuing “warnings” that prove to be fatal errors.

But then while searching on the web, I found
a Lenovo program that looked
interesting: Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers\EUROA\Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools\Internet Connections.
And of course it's installed on my machine, and it seems to do everything I want, once I
work my way through the somewhat back-to-front documentation. What I want is the “Best
Available Network” Profile, which will connect me by Ethernet when present and by 802.11
otherwise.

All done! Well, no. It wouldn't allow me to set a static address. Why not? Because! So
I'll have to reconfigure dhcpd to serve the same address—assuming that that will work. Another task for
tomorrow.

By yesterday evening I had most things working on euroa, my new laptop. The only
things remaining were automatic switching of network interfaces and running X on the VM.

The X issues appear to be an additional port, emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions,
which should be easy enough to handle, but it wasn't as important as the network
connectivity, so I looked at that first. The real issue was that the “ThinkVantage Tools”,
in this case “Access Connections”, wouldn't let me set static IP addresses with interface
fallback, so I needed to update dhcpd to serve the same address. Does that even work? Looked at the man
page, not the clearest document I've seen, and it took me a while to work out how to set it.
In the meantime I got error messages like:

hostname is not a valid keyword, but the man page led me to believe that it was.
It should be option host-name. But that alone didn't help:

No subnet declaration for em0 (192.109.197.137).
** Ignoring requests on em0. If this is not what
you want, please write a subnet declaration
in your dhcpd.conf file for the network segment
to which interface em0 is attached. **

Not configured to listen on any interfaces!

More head-scratching, and finally I came up with my configuration with the hosts inside
the subnet declaration, though logically outside it:

Is that kosher? The obvious thing is to try it out. The Lenovo tools have one great
advantage: they tell you something about the cause of the error. In this case it was ”DHCP
server not responding”. OK, take a look, from eureka:

So nice, so nice, we do it twice! tiwi shouldn't be running a dhcpd, but that
wasn't the problem: it wasn't running when the problem started. Was the reply not getting
back to the system? That seems strange: the MAC addresses are consistent. Still, it's
straightforward enough to install Wireshark,
so did that. Tried again, but what I saw wasn't what I expected: the reply got home, and I
was connected. And there were no entries in /var/db/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases.

Somehow that was the order of the day. Various strange problems showed up and disappeared
again as soon as I tried to trace them. Things weren't helped by messages of this quality:

Yes, the error existed. I had copied the virtual machine from eureso
(192.109.197.195) to euboea (192.109.197.143) without changing the
configuration, so they were both using the same IP. But why didn't the message say what the
IP address and the MAC addresses were? Isn't this so much more informative?

OK, they say to look in the “Windows” System Event
Log. Where's that? Why don't they tell me?

So I changed the IP address of euboea. No connectivity any more.
Routes? ARP?
Virtualbox? Spent quite a bit
of time searching, and ultimately, to test, swapped the IP addresses, and things worked
again.

What didn't work was automatic switching. When I disconnected
the Ethernet connector, nothing
happened. I could select the 802.11
interface and activate it with the Lenovo tool, but nothing happened automatically.

Why is this so difficult? I can't be bothered any more. Tomorrow I'll update
the DNS entries to show the IPs the other way
round, and that will be that.

There may be an easy way to find Australian place names matching eu.*a. Try http://overpass-turbo.eu/, which is a front-end to the OpenStreetmap
database. Pasting the following code in the editor and clicking "Run" (top left) should do
the trick.

If you omit the first line you can even show the places on a map. Two buttons (top right)
allow you to switch between the "Map" and the "Data" view. Replacing the [place~".*"]
part with [place~"city|town"] will filter the results.

Interesting idea. The interface to the site is Really Horrible: it wants me to run
Microsoft, and ignores all X conventions. It starts
out with a sample query, and to replace it I need to use menus to select and delete it, then
use a menu to paste the new query. But finally it comes up with:

place

name

@lat

@lon

is_in:state

hamlet

Eucla

-31.6768407

128.8865164

Western Australia

town

Euroa

-36.7527608

145.5687630

Victoria

town

Eugowra

-33.4290506

148.3708456

New South Wales

hamlet

Eurobodalla

-36.1483333

149.9677778

hamlet

Eunanoreenya

-35.0627756

147.4713537

suburb

Euberta

-35.0650000

147.2011111

hamlet

Eurimbla

-32.8461111

148.8433333

hamlet

Euchareena

-32.9385499

149.0955745

locality

Euratha

-33.8816667

146.5511111

hamlet

Eureka

-28.6830613

153.4383202

hamlet

Eurimbula

-32.8768100

148.8305005

hamlet

Eungella

-28.3483333

153.3011111

village

Euroka

-31.0816667

152.8011111

hamlet

Euroka

-33.7483333

150.2344444

suburb

Eureka

-37.5647184

143.8825965

suburb

Eungella

-21.1320725

148.4903719

town

Eudunda

-34.1741326

139.0848966

South Australia

farm

Euroka

-32.8518837

149.0864452

hamlet

Eurelia

-32.5538672

138.5611533

South Australia

farm

Eureka

-32.3536678

148.7674439

locality

Euthella

-26.4894982

148.6641605

farm

Eumalga

-31.6463253

147.5913785

farm

Eurella

-32.1313591

148.2400132

farm

Eumina

-32.2595560

149.1737552

farm

Euroka

-30.1962973

148.1494780

hamlet

Eureka

-25.2521373

152.1625893

hamlet

Eurebia

-40.9494200

145.1020700

neighbourhood

Eugenana

-41.2325800

146.3122000

That's a surprising number. Clearly I have stuff for a number of future machines.

I had in fact found Eugowra, but the name
didn't cause any euphonia (on consideration a potential name for an audio processing
machine), so I didn't choose it. I also decided against euphoria
and euthanasia, not only because they're not place names, but also because at
least euthanasia is just plain too long. Even so, I wonder if I have made the right
choice of names, as this partial output shows:

It's been nearly 11 years since I flew in a plane, and I
don't regret it. In the preceding nearly 50 years I watched air travel degenerate from a
privilege where people were treated specially to something akin to bus travel, particularly
in the USA. My opinion of air travel
degenerated accordingly. The absolute bottom of the list
were United Airlines
and American Airlines, in
ascending order. Only on Saturday we discussed it at dinner: you'd almost think that the
airline personnel were paid to be unfriendly.

But people frequently complain about this or that airline. Nowadays things are different:
firstly, by all accounts, they're even worse, and secondly just about everybody has a
portable recording device. So when a passenger was
forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight, the videos made it round the world.
And United stock fell sharply. Bravo! Hopefully they will realize that it's their
customers who keep the company afloat.

Just before breakfast got a call from Chris Bahlo: her
ancient Landcruiser had
broken down near the Mount Mercer
road turnoff. Off to pick her up and take her home. She tells me that the engine suddenly
lost power, that she heard “valve noise”, and that it then produced a lot of smoke and
steam, and lost copious quantities of water.

What's that? My best bet is a head gasket, but Chris is worried that the engine might have
had it. We'll find out, but not quickly: once again the breakdown happened when
people were on holiday, and Matt won't be able to look at it for a week.

Those are (only) two kippers laid against each other and deep frozen: each side shows a
single fish. No earthly way to remove just one of them. Why? So I had to thaw out both of
them, and I'll eat the other one on Saturday.

Next to grill them. How long? From what side? The instructions on the box are clear: “To
grill: Thaw kippers and grill”. That's a lot of help.

In the end gave them about 9 minutes from the outside, and they seemed to be OK. Here
before and after:

As planned, changed the DNS entries
for euboea and eureso today. That worked, though there are indications that
the problem isn't as simple. But it's just too much pain. One day I may try again and see
if I can get any further.

On the other hand, revisiting X on euboea
Just Worked, though I was limited to a resolution of 1024x768. The LCD screen
on euroa is 1600x900, and it would be nice to be able to fill that. But I've had
enough for the while.

I really hadn't intended to do much more with my laptop euroa and euboea, but
somehow it didn't turn out that way. In principle things are working, though I don't dare
try to switch from wired to wireless networking, but I couldn't get X to display larger than 1024×768.

Went looking and discovered, as expected, that it uses the vesa driver, which has
always appeared to be limited to this resolution. But looking at the Xorg.log, it
seems that the limitation was the (implicit) horizontal sync setting. In a VM that's
meaningless anyway, so I set horizontal sync max to 200 kHz and added a 1600×900 mode to
the xorg.conf.

But it didn't find it. It also didn't reject it: it wasn't mentioned in the log file at
all. Instead it started a display with the preconfigured 1152×900 resolution. That at
least showed that the change in horizontal sync was correct, but for some reason the mode
line was not being recognized.

So I commented it out again. Surprise, surprise! I got a resolution 1600×1200, too big for
the screen. Either way, it's a problem. The display window doesn't take up the entire
screen: it runs inside a Virtualbox window which also leaves the task bar free, probably correctly. That's
not what I want, so before I go looking for the reason that X doesn't recognize
the ModeLines (probably bit rot, I fear), I should look for alternatives.

One particularly irritating discovery is that I don't seem to be able to remap the
keyboard. Like most modern keyboards,
the ThinkPad has
a CapsLock key where the Ctrl key should be. But unlike most keyboards, it
seems to be hard-wired. In addition, this particular keyboard doesn't even have
a Ctrl key at bottom left, where they usually relocate it: instead they've put a
Fn key there, and the Ctrl key to the right of
it, making things very uncomfortable.

On the other hand, I've never tried using xmodmap on Virtualbox before, so it's
possible that I can save the day if I can find a utility to remap keys on Microsoft.

Please change all instances of OzForex to OFX. If you require more detailed information please let me know, we will be happy to provide this.

Your time and help in updating these links is greatly appreciated.

Amazing! This is a historical document. Should I even change it? Probably. More
interesting is the fact that they have quoted my comment about the obfuscatory information,
but apparently done nothing about it. Specifically, look at this information, from their
home page:

In other words, this conversion has nothing whatsoever to do with OFX! To find out their
rates, you must first sign up. It's interesting to compare it with my favourite currency converter, from OANDA, which is much more flexible:

In summary, the mail message had two good things: it made me look at the issue again (has it
really been 2½ years?), and it proves once again that people can look so much at the details
that they forget the overview.

Revisiting my finances, I probably need two things to save money on our European pension
payments. One is clearly a cheaper transfer of round 1,700 € a month. The sum is
important: if you transfer more than 10,000 €, you can get it fee-free from many companies.
Not so for only 1,700 €.

But then there's the question of paying for things bought in Europe, which happens about
once a month. We currently do that with credit card or PayPal. Either way it's expensive: of every € paid in
Germany, we end up with about 97%. Then the credit card transfer takes a further 3%, so
we've lost round 6% of the total value. Wouldn't it be easier to have an account in
Germany, have our pensions paid into that, also use it to pay for purchases in Europe, and
transfer to Australia at our leisure?

One of the really nice things about X is that it's a
networked system. One solution for my X display on euboea might be to not run an X
server on it at all, but on euroa, the host system, running Microsoft. Went looking
and found xming and
(maybe) VcXsrv, for
which I found looping links and very little documentation.

Downloaded xming and installed it. The setup menu offered me an empty server or
an xterm, so I chose the latter. Fired up X, error message: xterm doesn't
exist. OK, I can download it, but somehow I'm losing interest.

One thing that did work was swapping the Fn
and Ctrl keys on the laptop. That's a BIOS setting, and unfortunately they're the
only two keys you can swap. I did find sharpkeys, which promised to do the
trick, but comes with (inter alia) the warning:

Things that SharpKeys +will not+ do:

Protect you from yourself - if you disable your DEL key and can’t login because
Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn’t work now, you’ll have to reformat

That's not quite the rate I saw yesterday. Had things changed that much? No: OANDA don't
charge any fees for a transfer, but they use an exchange rate that even the banks would be
ashamed of, fully 4% off
the Interbank rate!

The first display was just a lie. “Recipient Getting” $1,368.70? Forget it. Only
$1,355.01! And I can't aggregate transfers. One of Yvonne's
pensions pays only round 130 € a month. That looks like this:

In this case, OANDA is better, but we're still looking at rates that must be worse than the
banks. Looking at a recent transfer from my bank, it seems that they deduct 3%. It should
be possible to do better than that, but clearly neither OANDA nor OFX are the solution.

In principle I want to be able to remap the keys on euroa, my physical laptop. But
there's a warning that it may brick the machine if I accidentally remap keys that I need to
use the machine. That can't happen on FreeBSD, because the key map isn't loaded until multiuser mode. But presumably there's an
alternative: remote access to the machine. Can rdesktop do it? Hard to say: it does
seem to apply some keyboard
mapping. Can ssh do it?
Probably, since it doesn't simulate the keyboard.

PuTTY is the canonical implementation
of ssh for Microsoft, and I've worked around its strangenesses in the past. But it's
only a client, and I need a server.

So I downloaded a Bitvise (“free for personal use”), an ssh server with even more bizarre configuration. I
wasn't able to get it to work at all: the machine didn't seem to be listening on
port ssh. Why is this Microsoft stuff so strange?

Finally a dry day without much wind—just what I need to spray the weeds. Managed to drag
myself to it, in the process noting how much spray the new electric unit uses. It also
doesn't hold its promise of being a 16 l unit; I was barely able to put 15 litres on top of
the few drops left in the bottom. I should probably add not more than 14 l at a time.

More attempts today to integrate euroa, my
Microsoft-based ThinkPad, into my
network. After my failure to get anything useful out of Bitvise (a name which, I have
decided, implies a vice rather than a Germanified wisdom), tried another one, freesshd. Like so many of these things, it
doesn't come with adequate documentation. But together they just didn't work. There seems
to be only the program FreeSSHd.exe, which on first start creates new keys (without
asking), and allows a selection of the kind of authentication that it will accept. And then
it started, spawning dozens of processes that wouldn't go away even when, in frustration, I
removed it from the system. In the meantime I found third party documentation which pointed to some of the stepping stones I had found.
But no way of stopping the bloody thing, and no connectivity.

The other day I
noted the misleading exchange rates that OFX produced on their web site—they're not their own exchange rates, just 1% off the Interbank rate—but I forgot
one detail: how do they compare with their real rates? Here's a comparison, transferring
1000 € to Australia. The first is their non-binding leader, the others two iterations of
real offers:

The first is their home page, the second a first attempt at an exchange rate, and the third
a further deduction. Clearly the first two are very misleading, though the second of the
two is probably just sloppy web programming. But, as ever, these things are better as a table:

Method

Sum received

Total deductions

Percent difference

Interbank rate

1399.55

0.00

0.00%

OFX leader

1398.11

1.44

0.01%

OANDA

1383.32

16.23

1.16%

OFX try 1

1373.40

26.15

1.87%

OFX try 2

1359.67

39.88

2.85%

ANZ bank

1357.56

41.99

3.00%

The difference between what OFX initially advertise and what they actually offer is over 3%.
That looks like a deliberate attempt at deception to me.

It's getting to be time to finally replace the normal gas range in the kitchen. But what do
we replace it with? Clearly something with better spacing. On the other hand, do we want
gas or induction? I've had our table-top induction cooker for the best part of a year now, and I've
had time to think about its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are certainly
better and more powerful heating. On the down side, there's the known problem that it needs
special cookware. That's not always possible, for example if I want to warm up something in
a ceramic serving dish, but I could always get a ferromagnetic disk to put on top of the
plate. On the other hand, temperature and heat control is something that my current cooker
doesn't do at all well.

So: what do I need of a cooker (independent of heating method)?

Able to supply much heat quickly. Here the induction cooker wins.

Able to maintain constant low heat, for example for simmering. It's difficult to decide
how best to approach this problem, but no current heating method does it well.

There
are two approaches: constant energy, or constant temperature. Constant energy is
sufficient for simmering, but not for very slow frying, where constant temperature
should be better.

The gas range I have should have the advantage in supplying constant energy,
except that the thing isn't adjustable low enough. That's a particular fault of the
cooker we have, but all gas cookers have a minimum heat below which the flame goes out.
And this may already be too much.

I had thought that there's no way for an induction cooker to measure temperature, but
that's just plain wrong: an infrared thermometer would work fine. The problem is
understanding how to set the temperature. For simmering, you'd need a very non-linear
curve with fine detail round 100°, while for frying I'm not sure how to do it correctly.

When it comes to dosing energy, it's clearly best to have fine control at the low end of
the energy range. And this is where my current cooker is particularly bad: it has eight
settings, but whoever chose them has obviously understanding of neither energy nor
cooking: they're marked 300 W, 600, 900, 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800, 2100 W, which shows a
(logarithmic) curve like this:

Not surprisingly, it's as good as impossible to find a correct low power setting. The
builders of the device seem to have sensed this, and there's some reason to believe that
there is some kind of temperature measurement as well, but I haven't been able to guess
how it works. Certainly the instructions are no help at all.

The cooker should heat evenly. None really do, but in the case of induction cookers
unevenness is much more obvious, since the heat is generated inside the cooking vessel
itself. The result is that my 32 cm frying pan doesn't really work that well on my
current cooker, which is designed for 30 cm (28 cm?) vessels, and which has a hole in
the middle of the heating coils. The distribution is very obvious. On a gas flame with
the same utensils things are much more even, partially because of where the heat comes
from and partially because of where it goes (convection).

So it seems as if a combination of gas and induction coking might be right. How about a
four burner 60 cm gas cooktop and a 2 “burner” 30 cm induction cooktop? Both are available.
But how do I find out whether they will fulfil my requirements? One induction cooker that
would fit the physical dimensions is the Midea MC-ID351 Induction Cooktop, onsale from
Appliances Online for $406. The “specs” limit themselves to the physical appearance
and dimensions, and omit such information as power usage or power levels. But a great thing
about Appliances Online is that
they include links to the product manuals, In this case, unfortunately, it's just a
spec sheet, which, to its credit, states that there are 9 power levels, but not even
how many heating areas it has, let alone how much power it uses. Appliances Online also
have a comparison page worthy of mention only because of its uselessness.

So what about reviews? The ones I found for free were worth what I paid for them. I found
two by customer review organizations, Choice (Australia) and Stiftung Warentest (Germany). The
German test includes the start for free, and the whole report costs 0.75 €. Choice
has 31 individual reviews and require a subscription (at least $23.95 for only 3 months).

In principle Choice might be worth it. But I've tried them in the past and found the reports pretty useless.
And the problem with the Stiftung Warentest is that they test items available in Germany,
not here, and also that it tests gas and conventional electric devices as well. Still, it
might come in handy if nothing else helps.

One problem with my new laptop is that it doesn't have phone functionality, including
networking over mobile telephone services. But then there's this new buzzword, “tethering”,
which seems to imply connecting mobile phones to laptops, a sort of special-case network.

Off to Google for “android tether bluetooth” and came up with many hits, all for much more
recent versions. Finally I found this one related (relatively
closely) to my phone. Followed through, and sure enough, it worked exactly as described,
ending with the following, carefully programmed to go away before you can read it:

No comment, but as far as I can tell the phone automatically turns
off Bluetooth access after a short
timeout. Turned it on and was at least able to pair my Bluetooth headset with the phone.

And the laptop? I was sure that a while back I saw a Bluetooth network interface, but it
was no longer. This page at first seemed to suggest that I needed an external Bluetooth dongle, but it seems that
the combination Fn-F5 will bring up a menu enabling you to enable and disable
various networking functions, including Bluetooth
and 802.11.

And that's about as far as I got. This page may help me do the
rest, but first I need to get the phone in an area with mobile network coverage.

It makes no sense at all for me to pay now $299 a year for a pair of ANZPlatinum credit cards when I can get credit
cards for free elsewhere—but not from ANZ. The most obvious choice appears to be the
Bank of Melbourne. They appear to
offer 5½ cards:

The obvious choice is the last one, “No A Fee”, which proves to be modern truncation for
“No Annual Fee”. So I called up Bank of Melbourne and was finally connected with a
consultant who seemed to have great difficulty understanding my application. The idea that
Yvonne and I could have five different incomes completely
baffled her, and she kept forgetting what I was saying, including the nature and frequency
of individual payments. At one point she invented a disability pension. And she expected
me to know the meaning of their own stupid abbreviations. My pension from Germany is
registered in their statement as:

What does RTGS mean? It appears to be important, but she wouldn't tell me: that's my
business. Nonsense. The pension comes from DRV, and the real information
(capitalized and truncated, of course) is „Deutsche Post AG Rentenservice“. Yvonne also gets a pension from them, but it's paid into ANZ, where the
advice is written almost in English.

In the end, after about 25 minutes, she told me that I would have to submit written evidence
of my income anyway. Much of it was on the screen in front of her. But if they want
documentary evidence, why all this rigmarole on the phone? Dammit, forget the whole thing,
connect me to somebody to whom I can complain. Was put onto Scott, who gave me a better
overview of the application process. And yes, it really seems that applying in person is
the best approach, though I can do it “online” (in other words, via the web).

What a waste of 40 minutes!

Later, in the late afternoon morning (German time), called up DKB in Berlin and got... a bloody voice menu, in German of
course. The funny thing is that it understood me, where Australian ones never do. And that
after being back here for 20 years.

When I got through to a consultant and told her that I lived in Australia, she told me could
still open an account as a German citizen. I had to explain to her that I was an Australian
citizen, which disqualifies me. Even Yvonne, as a French
citizen, can't open an account.

On the one hand, it was nice to notice that she thought I was German, but on the other hand
it contradicts what their web site told me the other day:

Unfortunately we cannot fulfil your wish... we only open accounts for clients in Germany,
Austria and Switzerland.

Still, no point in griping. Spent some time looking for alternatives, including similar
French banks, but without any success.

That was the easy part. First we needed to get water into the bath, which seemed easy
enough, except that the hose connections to the taps for the washing machine leaked, and at
one point blew away altogether, spraying water all over the laundry. And to save heating,
we used hot water, which proved to be too hot. Time for a T piece for both hot and cold
water. Under the circumstances, we didn't get round to testing the heating, though there's
no reason to believe that there's any issue there.

Those photos are uncropped, using my Zuiko Digital
ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 lens and EC-20 teleconverter for a total focal length of 600 mm (1200 mm full frame equivalent). At that
size, they don't look too bad, but in fact they're very out of focus, as even a “small”
version (click on image) shows: basically autofocus didn't work at all.

Spent some time looking at specifications for induction cookers. Specs and online
comparisons were pretty useless, but while looking, Appliances Online offered me a “chat” with
Chloe, for which I received a transcript with time and date in American format, and a
completely emetic page layout, telling me nothing:

Chloe Tue, 04/18/17 11:58:00 am Australia/Victoria

Welcome to Appliances Online! Is there anything I can help you with?

Customer 11:58:00 am

Sure. Can you give me information on the power levels (in W) and the heating areas of the items I'm looking at?

Chloe 11:59:02 am

Hello! Wherever possible, we provide the manufacturer's information, but this is not yet available for all of our products. Only the details on the product page is available and also the attached manual.

Customer 11:59:19 am

So that's a "no"?

Chloe 12:00:18 pm

I'm afraid not. We do not have the power level per heating zone/burner.

Customer 12:01:05 pm

Thanks. That's only the most important selling feature. Comparisons like https://www.appliancesonline.com.au/compare/whi324ba-vs-ci302ctb1-vs-ci302dtb3/ are just a waste of everybody's time.

Chloe 12:04:13 pm

I understand, I apologise for the trouble. Will take note of this for the product specifications on the website.

Feel free to contact us again or call at 1300 000 500 if you need any assistance. Thank you and have a nice day.

On the other hand, the search through the product manuals did offer some hope. It would
clearly be too much to expect real specifications of power levels (only ALDI does that), but the manual for the Fischer & Paykel CI302DTB3 include a graph:

Modern computer technology continues to amuse me. I suppose I shouldn't be so critical; in
the Good Old Days, the idea of referring to the tangible parts of computers as “hardware”
was mildly amusing (we also referred to musical instruments like that), and “software” even
more so. But what's funny about smart (painful) phones? And why tie them up? From the
OED:

tether v. 3. To fasten or bind by conditions or circumstances; to bind so as to detain.

Just to save you some of the pain I've had with this: Bluetooth tethering is, like all
things bluetooth, a neverending source of frustrations. I've had much more luck with wifi
tethering; basically setting the phone up as an access point/router. It will supposedly
drain the battery faster, but I'll happily take a theoretically shorter battery life over
having to ever deal with bluetooth networking again.

On my Android 7 phone , this is in Settings, then More in the "Wireless & networking"
section, then "Tethering & portable hotspot". In there I have a "Set up Wi-Fi
hotspot" where I can set an SSID and password, and a toggle to turn it on. (It may be
faster to click the magnifying glass up top in Settings and search for "tether" - at least
on my phone that takes me directly to the right menu.)

On the laptop side you should - after a few seconds - be able to find and connect to the
wifi network the normal way, getting an IP address over DHCP. It's not absolutely perfect,
I sometimes don't get an IP address if the phone isn't happy with its internet
connection. Trying again typically works, though it's not supremely confidence-inspiring.

I can certainly feel for
Daniel's Bluetooth “experience”, and
it's good to remember that you can also
use 802.11. I'll try Bluetooth first next
time I'm in range, and if that causes too much pain, and if I still have time, I'll try
802.11.

Eat that, Malcolm Turnbull, the
man who claims you can watch 4 concurrent high definition TV programmes on a 25 Mb/s link.
But it does beg the question why it's so big. Something else to research, I suppose.

Uploading to YouTube took forever—projected 2
hours—but I accidentally didn't heed the warning to keep the window open, and the result was
a zombie image. When it was finally done, it had been downscaled to 720p with noticeably
poorer quality. Even then the clip was 206 MB.

Yvonne told me that she had run into the portable fridge that she had removed from the car
and put on the side, though it looked remarkably unscathed. She dropped in to the
panelbeaters in town, and they said they could do it right away, so I followed her into town
and we did the shopping together. But when we got back, they hadn't even started, so we
left it there until tomorrow.

Joan Harrington's new dog Sam is still learning to behave. Two weeks ago he required quite some
time to calm down after seeing me, so last week Yvonne went
round to desensitize him. She had planned another visit today, coupled with paying for the
dog bath. He's getting much better. In fact, in the photos I took of him, he looks
perfectly behaved:

It's clear that he recognized something. And later, while I was searching YouTube for some old clips of Nemo, Leonid came and took a look, went right up to the screen, but instead of nudging it, he sniffed
around. Not what I expected, but it makes perfect sense from a dog's point of view.

Two identical paper mail letters today, from ANZ
bank: they're closing
their Sebastopol branch due
to lack of interest (“Internet banking” being the stated culprit). Another sign of the
times. Time to write a signs
of the times page. I suppose we'll get by relatively well as long as there's an ATM
nearby.

It offers different links for customers and non-customers. I'm a customer, so I selected
the customer link. It took forever, several minutes. When I finally persuaded something to
appaer, the first question was: “Are you a customer?”. It promised me to be done in 5
minutes, implicitly excluding the time I had waited already, and asked me more questions
even than the consultant yesterday, some of them sensible, like whether I had any debts, and
what other credit cards I had. One was “shall we allocate a credit limit?”. I had asked
for that yesterday, and the consultant told me that that wasn't allowed. On the other hand,
there was no option to include Yvonne in the application.

Before we can finalise the assessment of your application you will need to send us copies of the following documents:

Your latest Notice of Assessment with Tax File Number blacked out (Income Tax Returns are unacceptable). Last two month’s business bank statements – if business bank accounts are not held with Westpac

For self funded retirees, please submit a copy of your most recent Super Fund/Trust statement OR a letter from your Financial Advisor that confirms your regular earnings OR a current Notice of Assessment issued less than 18 months ago.

A statement from Centrelink that is less than 3 months old and shows the two most recent payments for Centrelink payments.

You can send your documents:

using the pre-filled e-mail BOMCC@bankofmelbourne.com.au
(note: you can take a photo and email it from your mobile phone)

or fax on 1300 660 298

Please be sure to write the application number on each document and in your email subject line if you don't use the pre-filled e-mail.

Once we have received your documents and verified you we will contact you via phone, SMS or email.

What's wrong with this picture?

What's a notice of assessment? From the context, it's a taxation item. And I don't pay
tax.

I'm retired, and they should know that. What's this nonsense with business bank
accounts?

They want a statement from Centrelink? They might as well ask for blood from a stone. And they
have the last two years' payments on record.

Send either photos of the documents, only via mobile phone, please,
or faxes. Who uses fax any more? Implicitly you can't send scans or real
photos.

There's no information on how to contact a human being.

I think I'll wait until they contact me. In the meantime, I need to look at customer
satisfaction ratings for Australian banks. Maybe this experience is telling me that my days
with the Bank of Melbourne are drawing to a close.

Call from Paul Haege of OFX today. No, not a
reply to my request for more correct exchange rates on their home page; he wanted to find
out more about me and what I expected of OFX. I pointed out the disadvantage of a 10 € fee
on every transaction, and he told me that he would waive it. That does make a difference,
nearly $16 per month compared to ANZ. Is it worth it? I still need to find a bank in
Europe.

In other news, Andy Snow pointed me at this page from OANDA that
mentions additional charges that I hadn't noticed. I should look at it some time.

I grew up in Malaysia, even very close
to the Thai border for a while (Kota
Bharu), but I don't really understand Thai food. Some years ago I bought a jar
of pad thai paste, and had been meaning
to use it for something. It expired in October 2010, so it's not too early. Basically I
adapted the curry laksa recipe.
Interestingly, though the quantities were not quite what I wanted.

How did it taste? Not bad, but surprisingly (considering it was a copy of another recipe)
not enough. Here's the recipe.

More investigation of European bank accounts today. At the end I came to the conclusion
that I couldn't do it without a European address. I found some information about DKBhere: it seems that it
has something to do with the recent
Euro crisis. And that suggests that
I'm unlikely to find anybody else. That page also suggested N26, but after trying to sign up I got:

Great you’ve heard of us

N26 isn’t available yet in Australia

Enter your email address and be the first to know if we’re available

So I did that, but it doesn't sound as if they're just about to open up here. So I'm still
without a bank.

Then there's ABN AMRO, the most reputable of the
banks I've seen. They will open accounts under some circumstances, but it seems to be
oriented towards the big spenders (more than 10,000 € in the account). And I don't speak
Dutch.

What are the alternatives? Banks active here as well. And I'm still investigating that.
What I see is that, once again, fees are involved, and it's not clear to what extent I can
use such an account for paying for things in Europe, which was one of my main
considerations.

Several months ago my
Android tablet
died. The battery wasn't charging, and it seems that that caused some failure requiring a
complete tablet reset. And after that it was a brick.

But then some months
later, with the next Android pain, I found a way to restart the tablet without
entering Android. It required use of the Start button, something that the tablet
doesn't have, and also the volume controls. Messed around with the power and volume
buttons, not helped by the glacial response times, and finally got into something that,
without further ado, reformatted the flash memory and brought back a virgin Android system.
And, of course, it wanted me to charge the battery, which is still touch-and-go with the
poor connectors that ALDI (or Bauhn?) use. I'll continue when the battery is
something like charged.

The tomato at bottom left is almost charred, while the one at top left is barely cooked.
This was done on my induction cooker with a cheap, thin frying pan, which thus conducts heat
to the food faster than across the base. It's almost impossible to know how the tomatoes
are cooking until you turn them over.

Does this mean that the thin pans are no good? No, not necessarily. The thinness also
means that they heat up much more quickly. From cold, they're too hot too touch literally
in a matter of seconds. And the unevenness doesn't make any difference for boiling (think
cooking pasta), and it's acceptable for frying when there's a fair amount of food in the
pan. But in this case I'm going to have to stick to thicker pans, and hopefully find a more
evenly heating cooker.

Once again I was done far faster than Yvonne, and over to
complete her visit with her.

This marks a year since we started the visits. The dogs are really not enjoying it overly. From the
beginning we wondered whether Borzois had
the right temperament to do this kind of work, and gradually we're coming to the conclusion
that they don't. We should plan some kind of exit.

Today I became aware of a new way to fake URLs:
use Unicode. For example, https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com leads to a site whose URL displays as
https://www.аррӏе.com/. It takes a lot of looking to realize that the а is Cyrillic
а (0x430), not Latin a (0x61). The worrying thing is that it's really
difficult to protect yourself against this stuff. The description at the link describes
some of the issues.

The Dereel Camera Crew had planned a trip
to the Enfield Wetlands today
to take photos. I've been through Enfield hundreds of times, but I wasn't aware of any
wetlands, and neither is Google. All I knew was that I should bring both telephoto and
macro lenses, suggesting birds and insects or flowers.

Down to the Dereel Hall at 14:00 to find
it closed, and nobody at all outside. Talked to some blokes at the Men's Shed, and then a car arrived: Lorraine
Carranza, trying to get rid of some of her copious harvest of chestnuts.

Off to Enfield on the off chance that I might find somebody or something to photograph.
Neither worked. The State
Park is full of Epacris
impressa at this time of year:

But that's all. Drove down numerous unmade roads and found nothing that we don't have just
round the corner from our house. Back to find that they had implicitly cancelled the
meeting. Somehow people seem to be losing interest.

The failure of my helicopter photos on Tuesday had me wondering, and I set off doing some comparisons. How about that:
the combination of Zuiko Digital
ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 and EC-20 2×
teleconverter does not focus at all with the OM-D E-M1 Mark II! I tried
it with other cameras (E-M1 and E-PM1), where it
focussed with its usual glacial speed, but with the E-M1 Mark II it didn't even try. It's
only this combination: the Zuiko Digital ED 35-100mm
f/2.0 works fine, though it's not clear what use a 70-200 mm f/4 weighing nearly 2 kg
might be.

Yet another reason to replace it. And the clear replacement is a lens that they call the
LEICA DG VARIO-ELMAR 100-400mm / F4.0-6.3 ASPH. / POWER O.I.S., in other words a
Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3. Strangely, the cheapest price I could find
anywhere in the world was in Sydney with
eGlobaL. They're asking
$1,628, compared to a list price of $2,200. And in
the USA the list price is $1,800, or a little
over $2,380 at current exchange rates. Once Australia was expensive, but now it seems to be
one of the cheapest places to buy equipment.

About the only issue is that I had to find an address where they would send it without
ridiculous surcharges, effectively
meaning Ballarat. So once again Chris
Bahlo (who conveniently came for dinner) gets involved, now that she's working at the
prestigious Centre for eResearch and Digital
Innovation.

In the last few months we've seen a surprising number
of millipedes, more than for years.
They're an exotic species, and they have no natural enemies
in Australia. Even the cats may play
with them, but they're clearly not edible.

We were talking about them in the evening—Chris Bahlo hates the crunchy noise they make when
you tread on them—but when she left, they were waiting for her:

While researching, I was asked to fill out a survey about my web site experience on the US web site. In fact,
it wasn't too bad, modulo the uncertainty about the image stabilization. But the survey had
its own surprise:

Australia is so unknown that it's not
even an option on the list! Neither is the USA, but that's because it's so special that
it's a separate question.

Next, pay for the lens. I had started entering details yesterday evening, and that was too
long for the site, so it timed out, taking my discount code with it, and
requiring me to enter all the details again. I have another code that I
wanted to use for another purchase, so I used that instead. And then
this horrible“Verified by Visa” came in and told me that my mobile phone details were incorrect.

It appears that ANZ might not have your
current Mobile number. Please contact ANZ for further assistance on 03 8699 6908.

What mobile phone details? VbV don't need no steenking mobile phone number, and I was
pretty sure that I didn't provide one. Called up the number, which gave me a choice of two
options: 1 for online banking, 2 for everything else. OK, 2. “A valid response has
not been received” (and not “sorry, I don't recognize the entry “2””). Repeat. Same thing.

After about 20 times, I gave up and called again (redialled). This time I got something
completely different, a voice non-recognition menu. After a couple of minutes I fought my
way through to a human, who confirmed that the requirement was from VbV, and that they
wanted to send me an SMS to confirm
something. Security, they say, but of course I can work around it if I know my secret
password. A lot of security that is! It's just a waste of time. I won't be in a position
to receive an SMS for at least a week. She disabled the requirement, and I left her to
forward my opinion of the whole process to anybody who might care.

Back to pay for my lens. The web page had hung itself up, and I had to restart, and, for
the third time, enter all details, which they hadn't bothered to store. And finally I could
pay for the thing, after only 30 minutes trying.

Beck's make reasonably good beer,
and I drink a lot of it. But their packaging! The slabs contain 4 six-packs tied together
by robust polypropylene straps, and
I have to cut through them to get them apart.

In the middle of last week the Bureau of
Meteorology forecast a week of wet weather. It didn't quite happen like that: most of
the weather has been warm and sunny. Only on Thursday night did it rain a lot, about 15 mm.
And the combination has caused many mushrooms to pop up almost overnight, like a number
of Agaricus campestris and
these Amanita muscaria:

The “Asia trip” was the name we gave to our trip
from Singapore overland
to London. This was well over a year
before the London to
Sydney marathon. It was both one of the great experiences of my life and a turning
point: before “home” was where my parents lived. Afterwards, I was on my own. 50 years!
How time flies when you're having fun!

While in town last week, I
picked up some likely looking mixtures for breakfast. Woolworths have a number of mixtures for south-east
Asian food, including Laksa paste from
Ayam, a company I know and respect. Unlike
MARION'S KITCHEN (which is also in stock at Woolworths; maybe I was wrong in my assumption
a couple of months ago that
it came from ALDI), it comes in a jar, which
makes it much easier to remove the correct amount and replace the rest.

So I tried it today. Terrible! Far too much chili, although it was marked “medium”,
and not much other flavour. I need to reconsider my opinion of well-known brands. I've
already established on multiple occasions that Pataks are to be avoided, and now Ayam. By comparison MARION'S KITCHEN is much
better.

I'm preparing to sell some lenses, so I need good photos. Spent some time today, but the
results were anything but encouraging. Try as I might, they seem to be covered in dust—at
least in the photos. I can't see anything with my naked eye. And then there are marks
which the Lens Pen should have removed, but
didn't:

None of this is damage to the lens, but it does make it clear how difficult it is to get a
lens really clean. In particular, the spot on the rim at bottom right in the last photo is
dirt that should have been removed by the lens pen.

Taking photos of my lenses and listing them took up a significant proportion of the day.
It's a good thing I'm not charging for my time, or it might not have been worth selling some
of them. And in the process I examined the lenses more closely than I have for some time,
making a disturbing discovery in the process:

That appears to be a separation of the elements inside the lens (the Zuiko Digital
ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6). Damn. I'm sure that it doesn't make a serious difference to
the quality of the images, but it does make a serious difference to the price I can get.
What the hell, it's not worth much anyway, and I can always use it if it doesn't sell.

On a more positive note, it looks as if I have already sold the M.Zuiko 12-40 mm
f/2.8 “Pro”. That was faster than I expected; now I'm going to have to buy a
replacement.

From time to time we fake Swedish Husfrusill using Matjes fillets. Recently on IRC
Henrik Johansson mentioned eating it with boiled eggs. To my surprise, he wanted
soft-boiled eggs. Yvonne and I discussed it and decided
that, for non-Swedish palates at any rate, hard-boiled eggs would be better:

Only 2 days ago was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Asia trip, one of the turning points of my life. And today's
another anniversary: 20 years ago today I
left Germany for good, on the way
to Australia. It's not appropriate to
say that I never looked back—I was back in Germany briefly later in the year—but it's
certainly another turning point.

So off to eGlobaL again, the
purchase made a little easier by the fact that they now have most of my details on file.
All went relatively smoothly until it came to payment. And then... Bloody “Verified by Visa”! Once
again it wanted a mobile phone number. Will they buy me a mobile phone? Of course
not.

Damn VbV! The banks should be ashamed of themselves. It's not as if it adds significant
security. I can bypass it with a simple password (“my secret”). If the Bank of Melbourne ever processes my online
application (which I can't influence), I'll have to make sure that doesn't happen.

But there's always PayPal. Should I risk it?
The lens costs $990, and this morning we only had $800 in the bank, from which Yvonne had already deducted some sum. Yes, I know how to change the
payment source when buying on eBay, but this
isn't eBay, and they have a different interface which may not offer me the option.

But checking the accounts showed that the money for the new lens had already arrived, so I
went ahead. I needn't have worried. I still had the option, which included using the
credit I had. But it changed the shipping address! I had to go back to the original order
Yet Again and reinstate the address. Another half hour payment. Hopefully that'll be the
last.

A couple of weeks ago the battery in one of our cordless phones died. Not a worry, it
proved: they're available on eBay. So I
ordered one, sent from Melbourne. It
arrived today, fully 12 days after I ordered it and it was marked sent! I had previously opined that a persistent
snail would be faster, but this represents a speed of 0.45 km/h. The persistent snail would
laugh its head off. Australia Post, how do
you explain that?

One explanation might be that the claimed sending date was wrong. That's what dated post
stamps are for. But that seems to be a relict of the 20th century, and few packages display
it. So it was today. But the slowness of Australia Post is really unforgivable, and if
they want to prove their innocence, they can always require some kind of dating for
untracked items.

I noticed you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper in your post, and just wanted to give you a heads up that I recently wrote a blog post you might like. It's a
detailed, up-to-date 7,000 word guide on 15 health benefits of bell peppers according to
science, and includes 5 delicious bell pepper recipes.

But the real thing is that it looks so familiar. It's almost identical to the message I
received at the end of last
month. And how about that, last time the sender was Jen
Miller <jen@jenreviews.com>, and this time it's Jesse Miller
<jesse@jenreviews.com>. At the time I had thought (but not mentioned) that the
references were discovered by looking through the HTML markup, but this mail proves it.

Cockatoos are widespread
in Victoria, and they
frequently come in large swarms. But they're almost invariably
the Sulphur-crested
variety, and the various black ones are much rarer.

But lately we've been seeing big swarms of them. Well, Yvonne has seen them, and I've just heard them. Today I had time to put on my (old)
telephoto lens and take a single uninteresting shot, barely showing that
they're Yellow-tailed
black cockatoos, before they disappeared:

Now that I'm using Microsoft far more than I really want to, it's probably time to subscribe
to some of the more technical forums. I've found a couple of useful tips at HowtoGeek, so I subscribed. Today I received a special
offer: “Download Computer Security Handbook, 6th Edition ($130 Value) FREE For a Limited
Time”.

OK, what's behind that? Probably not much. So I signed up, which required one of the most
complicated forms I've seen in a long while:

Even if I were still working, how could I fill that out? In the end I entered nonsense,
including “Sub Industry” to do with agriculture and Job Level as “Intern” (I had to choose
from their categories). And sure enough, it was accepted. What nonsense!

I got the book, which proved to be over 2000 pages long and originally written in 1973,
along with advertising for my specific “Sub Industry” of Computers and Technology:

I didn't have much expectations from the book, especially considering the age, but in fact
it seems to offer quite a detailed overview. It has been significantly updated in
revised in the 40 odd years between the first and sixth editions, but it leaves me wondering
how to read a document of that size on a monitor, especially as the page numbers are per
chapter.

Yvonne is gradually getting thoroughly fed up with Rani, who has really proven to be more complicated
than any cat we have ever had before. We've caught her defecating in all sorts of corners,
and we've been making sure that she always has access to a toilet, but today, once again,
she decided elsewhere: behind the music instrument cabinet in the corner, where only she can
get to. To clean the (multiple) mess away, we had to completely remove everything from the
cabinet.

Yvonne is completely fed up and wants to get rid of her. I'm not quite that far, but I can
understand her annoyance. The cat's 18 months old now; she should be out of that sort of
thing.

So it took 12 days to
receive an item
from Melbourne. Slow. What can
I expect from Hong Kong? On Sunday I bought a
new lens, and I've been following its progress. Here, upside down as usual, and barely little enough to
avoid truncation in the obligatory subwindow:

The experience was so positive that on Wednesday I ordered another lens, Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, again braving the pain that financial
institutions cause. But it wasn't sent off immediately: instead, it's still in a state
“Stock Issue”. So I sent them a message via the web site, and got a response within 15
minutes. Quick.

Unfortunately, we still have an unconfirmed date on Panasonic H-ES12060 Leica DG
Vario-Elmarit 12-60mm f/2.8-4 ASPH. POWER O.I.S. Lens It may take up to another 4 week or
even longer, which we cannot guarantee you now. Please help confirm if you would like to
have a refund.

Not at all what I expected. Slow. Looking at my credit card bill, they don't seem
to have deducted the sum, but that could just be lag on the part of the bank.

What do I do? The next-cheapest offer costs $39 more, but they have it in stock. On the
other hand, DxO Optics
“Pro” still don't have support for the lens, and looking at the difference between the
recommended retail price ($1,199) and what I paid ($979), it seems that there's a
possibility of a further price drop. For the while I'll think about it; it's quite possible
that the situation will change.

What's that nonsense? The normal nonsense: Australia Post issues tracking numbers with
spaces in them, but their web site is modern, and it treats spaces as delimiters.

In a world where people put spaces in file names to confuse parsers, it's really puzzling
that web designers go to the opposite extremes in accepting identifiers and sums of money
(try entering $1,234,500 in just about any site asking for sums of money).

Lorraine Carranza has given us a number of chestnuts from her tree. Problem: Yvonne doesn't like chestnuts. Or she says so; it's been such a long
time since she last tried them that she can no longer be sure. So I decided to use them as
a stuffing for a chicken, so that she can leave them if she still doesn't like them.

How do you process chestnuts? Only one cookbook gives me a suggestion: put a slit down the
side, boil for 5 minutes, then peel while they're still hot.

That doesn't work, of course. They need to cool down first, and when I tried it, I didn't
have the time. OK, warm them up again. But then they were so cooked that I couldn't just
pop the kernels out, I had to scrape them. Total time, for only about 350 g unshelled: over
an hour. I hope they'll be worth it.

Lately I've had problems with my bread rising, and I've been experimenting. More water?
More starter? Nothing seems to help. Today I tried both, along with an addition of some
dried yeast. That didn't help either: after 7 hours “rising”, I gave up and baked the
half-risen loaf, which barely made it to normal size.

Why? When reviving the starter, it rises happily enough in less time. The complete lack of
effect of yeast was unexpected, but I suspect that the acid environment might have
deactivate it. And then it occurred to me: I don't need more starter, I
need less. The first round shows that it's active enough, and to rise it needs food.
And by using more starter and less flour, I'm giving it less food. My “standard” method
takes a starter made from 64 g (rye) flour and adds 720 g, and then the next step adds
another 410 g. It would make sense to try a geometric progression next time: add 240 g
flour the first time round, and 880 g the second time round.

Chris Bahlo came along with my new Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3 this evening. I had to take a couple
of photos, if only to confirm the serial number (27CIF16G019P), and also to try out the
image stabilization. The images themselves were just what I could find in the kitchen, at
0.8 s and ½ s at f/4:

This is the first stabilized lens I have, and I still need to understand the interaction
between lens and body stabilization, and also the difference between the Olympus and
Panasonic implementations of lens stabilization. In any case, whatever stabilization I
used, it isn't sufficient to keep the image really sharp at that speed. Of course, the old
rule of thumb I learnt as a boy was “minimum shutter speed is 1/f”. That referred to 35 mm
cameras, and this lens (as used) has an equivalent focal length of 200 mm. So even 6 EVs of
image stabilization would only bring it down to ⅓ s. I'll see more plausible images in the
course of time.

Once I thought I could buy long telephotos cheaply. And indeed you can: I'm offering my old
Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 for only $220. The new lens cost nearly 8 times
that. What do I get for it? Slightly longer focal length is the most obvious difference.
There's little difference in aperture at the focal lengths that they share:

More to the point, I hope for faster autofocus. We'll see how that works when
the black cockatoos
come back again.

Took a number of photos with my new Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3 today. And how about that, it really makes
a difference. To start with,
the black cockatoos
flew by, and I managed to get a number of photos that, while not good, were an order of
magnitude better than what I had got previously:

The zoom ring on the Vario-Elmar turns in the opposite direction to all my Olympus zooms.
This is the first Panasonic/Leica zoom lens I have, but I assume it's a general issue. I
wonder how long it will take me to get used to it.

So we blocked the entrance behind the musical instrument cabinet, so that Rani couldn't use the space behind as a toilet. We
also made sure she had continual access to the designated toilet in the laundry. What did
she do? She crapped in front of the cabinet!

Gradually she's convincing us that it's time for her to go. I don't like giving up on a
cat, but it's been over a year now, and she's still not tame.

Those look like two different organisms. How could that happen? The stuff has a “best
before” date of “10-06-17”, which I interpret to mean 10 June 2017, still long in the
future. And it wasn't treated badly since we had it: brought home in a cooler bag and put
straight into the fridge.

Yes, of course we can get our money back. But it very nearly spoilt the whole dinner
preparations. If we had gone back to get another pack, it would have cost us about $40 for
the car, not to mention the waste of an hour. As it was, we found enough substandard dried
lasagne to make do.

More to the point, though, Yvonne wanted to use it anyway. I wonder how many other people
would do that. No wonder substandard food processing is responsible for many cases of food
poisoning. I have a mind to report it to the authorities.

I had barely got up when Yvonne asked me to see what was
wrong with dischord, the Microsoft box we use for photo processing. Dead! I
discover I had connected it to an unprotected power outlet, and the power indicator showed
that it wasn't powered on: for reasons I didn't investigate in time, it didn't come back up
after the power outage. Connected it to the UPS and it came up
happily, and it shouldn't happen again.

Next thing: check what's going on on IRC.
Disconnected from the proxy. Can't reconnect. Off the net? No, a ping to www
worked. Did my bip process die? It seemed
so. But then I saw:

A crash! After only 2 years uptime! How did that happen? I wonder if I'll ever beat the
nearly 5 years I
had by September 2013.

I also wanted to process photos, so I used euroa, the Microsoft laptop. It told me
it wanted to reboot to complete something. OK, humour it. It came back up again, and I
started using it. Then it froze. I couldn't even ping it. But it worked locally.
After a lot of checking, discovered that Norton Security had been enabled, and it had set all kinds of default filtration
without telling me, including blocking ICMP
and (apparently) remote desktop.
No setup screen, no asking: it just did it.

It also told me that I had 21 days for my free trial, after which I would have to pay Real
Money for the privilege of being blocked. OK, that's clarified the matter. Totally remove
the product.

It still didn't work! As a parting shot, it had enabled the “Windows” firewall!

Yes, of course we need security. But it needs to be appropriate. In my case, the machines
are behind a real firewall running on eureka, and that's something I can control. I
don't need no steenking toy firewall behind the real one.

But that's only half the issue. How do I compose the images? The viewfinder is too
difficult to use in that position, and the LCD display is too sensitive to sunlight. There
are two other possibilities: a clip-on viewfinder like the VF-2 that
I got a couple of months ago. That's designed to fit directly on the camera, not an
advantage in this case. But wouldn't it make so much sense to have it on a cable so that
you could mount it elsewhere? It's almost worth trying, but I suspect that cable impedances
will make it impractical.

So the remaining alternative is OI.Share, a broken mobile phone app which offers a remote viewfinder. I've tried it
several times over the years, and every time I have given up in disgust.

Today I tried again. Yes, it's just as broken. In fact, it seems to be even more broken:
on the Olympus OM-D
E-M1 Mark II the display “WiFi” that is supposed to be on the LCD display is missing.
Why? Some setting? It's present on the E-M1 Mark I. As usual, the “instructions” are no
help at all, and I wasn't able to fix it.

Connecting to the phone was, as ever, a pain. Start the app and it immediately claims that
there is no camera. I'm gradually finding out how to work around the bugs. Once the
initial setup (“Private”) has taken place,

Go to the “Settings/Wi-Fi” page, disable any connected network.

On the camera, select “WiFi”, either on the main screen if it works, otherwise
Menu/Playback/Connect to Smartphone”.

Wait 20 seconds. It takes the camera about 10 seconds to set up, and about another 8
seconds to connect to the phone. In my case it connected automatically, but it may need
help.